Greetings again my fellow FOPs (Friends of Pilot Imaging). It is I, your “Lightroom/Photography/Getting Your Creative Juices Flowing” tip guy. That really does not roll off the tongue nicely, does it? I’ll have to come up with something else soon. I’m also running out of space on my business cards.
Hopefully all of you have been out shooting like you’ve never shot before. Let’s get those creative juices flowing again. How about this time you try to shoot something that is nothing? Shoot shadows, try negative space, whatever you think is nothing. Once you’ve gotten really good at that, try it on a job. Instead for shooting your bride and groom dead center of your photo, try shooting them in the bottom right corner with tons of sky and grass in the background. Or try to have the sun blow out your background so that there is a faint vision of your bride and groom. Then take your photos back to your studio and turn one into a black and white, or punch up the contrast for your colors. Try something different and see what you get. I realize that some of you are old pros and this tip may seem rudimentary, but some of you newbies may find this tip helpful. So forgive me old pros if I am telling you something you already know. Now that that’s off my chest, let’s get on to tip number two.
This is not so much of a tip, but more of an announcement. Lightroom 3 beta is available here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/
Here’s some of what’s new:
• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)
Does that sound professional? Well it should, it was pulled right off of Adobe’s website. Give it a try and let them know what you think.
As for a tip, I’ll give you a quick shortcut. For those of you who like to see the long journey you and your photograph have taken, from regular photo to your final work of art in Lightroom, there is a quick and easy way to do this. To see your before and after in Develop Mode, just hit the backslash key, “\”, and you will see it. I always love to compare my befores and afters. Sometimes I get really stuck on a photo because I think the color or contrast is not right. After looking at the original photo my mind is always put at ease and I can look at my final product with a better perspective.
That’s it for now guys. Hope you have fun with the beta and our shortcut tip.
As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We’re here to help.
Until next time,
Your friends at Pilot Imaging.
Welcome to Pilot Imaging’s Lightroom Tips. Since this is our first tip ever, I thought we could go into some more detail about Lightroom. For those of you who don’t know, it is a catalog system. This means, it is used to catalog your photos while you make changes to them, as opposed to Adobe Bridge, which is a photo viewer/browser, where you can point directly to a folder and see the photos in that folder.
Are you heading to the 
